Part of the introduction from 'The Conspiracy of Good Taste' by Stefan
Szczelkun  published
by WORKING PRESS 1993  9.95 pounds sterling. ISBN 1 870736 69 9.

THE STORY OF HOW THIS PERCEPTION DEVELOPED.

In 1971 I was in The Scratch Orchestra* when it was visiting Newcastle and
the North East to do its 'dealer concert' series. These became notorious
through the media sensationalising Greg Brights piece 'Sweet FA'. The
local papers reported that the well known composer Cornelius Cardew had
written 'fuck' on scraps of paper and handed them to children.
At about the same time I was preparing my study of basic shelters, later
to be published by Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton as 'Survival Scrapbook 1:
Shelter.'. Unicorn Bookshop, with the beat poet Bill Butler at the helm,
had itself recently been taken to court in one of the rash of obscenity
trials at around this time; I think it was for selling 'The Little Red
Schoolbook'.
We were camping just outside Newcastle near the village of Overton. Just
across the river was a brightly coloured settlement of about fifty
'shanty' houses. These intrigued me. They were startlingly different from
the normal speculative, council or vernacular housing. Many were based on
an inventive adaptations that had grown from a basic van or shed. Their
improvised collage of found or cheap materials had a direct parallel in
our activity in the Scratch Orchestra and I took a morning off to
photographs them. Later as I travelled about the country I discovered more
and more of these shanties. Although they  enjoyed a minor architectural
vogue at the time and I wrote short articles for Architectural Design
Magazine and Radical Technology, it was to be almost twenty years before
the full implications of my fascination with these structures would become
clear to me.

The realisation was first intimated through  an unpublished thesis by Phil
Wren at Hull School of Architecture where I had a part time job around
1983. In this he pointed out that the growth of British shanties was a
product of the urban populations successful struggle for increased leisure
time. So the shanties were a product of proletarian culture! Although there
were clear influences at work, such as the colonial chalet with veranda,
the architectural language also incorporated much that was unique. I
realised that my attraction was based on a deep recognition of my own
cultural heritage. I empathised with such structures more strongly that
with, say, a conventionally beautiful Palladian villa. Phil Wren also
mentioned Clough Williams Ellis as one of the principal critics of the
shanties, which during the twenties and thirties had grown into scale of
activity, which could compete with the mortgage ethos, as a method of
creating homes. Ellis, a gentleman socialist, had pronounced the
shanties as "Englands most disfiguring disease". He and his cronies led
various campaigns against them culminating in the 1947 Town & Country
Planning Act. From the published accounts that I looked up in the RIBA
library in Portland Place, London it seems they were not aware of the
violence implicit in this closure of an important form of working class
culture.
A year after Phil Wren had written his thesis Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward
published a comprehensive study of the whole phenomena, 'Arcadia for All,
subtitled 'The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape', but I didn't see a copy
until I ordered it from the publishers years later.
The next chance event that influenced this line of thought was when I came
home in the middle of a TV programme that was showing how the revered
William Morris's Arts & Crafts movement had helped to create a romantic
myth about the British countryside, This had contributed to the formation
of a modern English National identity in preparation for the first world
war. Unfortunately I didn't find out the name of the programme or its
director, as the implication of what I had seen sank in only slowly.
Basically the great socialist hero William Morris, whose goodness was
always meant to have been beyond reproach, was creating a notion of
Englishness which was based on highly romantic, unreal and sanitised
picturing of the culture of the 'typical' rural person of some hundred
years ago. This 'roses-round-the-porch' interpretation of rural working
class heritage was presented as quintessentialy English; And well worth
dying for. Millions obliged in the next two world wars leaving its
inevitable wake of terror and horrification. William Morris the immaculate
socialist hero !
The person every young artist with a social conscience is directed to
study... That enemy of imperialism... So sensitive to human suffering and
beauty...so appreciative of the work of craftspeople...could this person
really have contributed to the horrors of modern nationalism!
Could this person have so misrepresented working class history? My
suspicions mounted, another gentleman socialist who seemed to be involved
in the repression of proletarian cultural autonomy...  Soon after this I
went up to Luton, to see Grahams Harwoods mural in a youth club which was
derived from his work in IF COMIC 1. In the youth club dustbin I found a
couple of copies of the Folk Music Review in which was a review of Pete
Harkers book 'Fakesong; the manufacture of English folksong from 1700 to
the present day. This argues that Cecil Sharpe, a major figure in defining
English Folk music, had been yet another well-bred gentleman socialist,
who had been busy misrepresenting working class culture for the common
good. Obviously there was something going on here... Three in a row deserved
further investigation...it seemed that the key to my own cultural
alienation might reside here...

After several discussions with Howard Slater, the picture was becoming
clear; As the cities grew and people, living poorly and in harsh
conditions, were in greater concentration than at any time in the past.
Inevitably these new conditions would give rise to new cultural relations;
culture which would give expression to the potential of this new
intensification of human community. In the sheer numbers there was power.
Power for a political overthrow of the class system that had never existed
before.
The French Revolution of February 1848 had signalled the end of the
European aristocratic monopoly of power. On the 10th April of the same
year the Chartists, known for their quasi autonomous and co-operative
cultural forms, gathered on Kennington Common, in South London*. The
Chartists demonstrated the power of the organised proletariat. The threat of
their march on Westminster had caused the aristocracy and  middle classes
to unite and stop them by force of arms. From then on the threat of the
new urban classes was taken seriously...with subsequent programmes of
repression.
The realisation of direct, unmediated political power depends on the
ability of everyday culture to express, channel and evolve social needs.
The upper classes sensed this and the importance of control in the
cultural arena.
In his book, 'Worship and Work' published in 1913, Samual Barnett, the
philantropist who set up Toynbee Hall;*
"...was convinced that the classes had become segregated in their
pleasures, and that the poor were developing their own style of life which
would eventually render them antagonistic to all established authority."
Worship & Work Letchworth 1913 quoted Waters P.68.

I then met John Roberts, the art critic, which led me to the discovery of
the book by Chris Waters, 'British Socialists and the Politics of Popular
culture 1884-1914' which validated these thoughts with a mass of
historical material. At 29 pounds odd the book itself was beyond my pocket
so I obtained a copy from the publishers by arranging to do a review for
Variant Magazine.

Apparently, middle class philantropists, do gooders and socialists had
been at work since the 1850s to ensure that the working class were denied
culture at all.. Ellis, Morris and Sharpe were just some of the more
charismatic examples of a mass of middle class enthusiasts who led us well
and truly up the garden path.
This suddenly went a good way to explain the lack of culture that I had
been born into. The vacuity I felt.  'Socialism' had been led or taken
over by a series of well heeled leaders who interpreted the 'elevation' of
the working classes only in terms of their own values. Values that they of
course assumed were universal achievements and represented objective
standards of excellence. If you were a Socialist you wanted to
redistribute this civilised culture to all less fortunate members of
humanity. For what intelligent person would not welcome the benefits of
civilisation! If they weren't grateful it only proved they were deficient
or irretrievably
damaged by poverty. One more reason for strong leadership from the class
'born to lead'. In the middle of the most violent repression they were
quite convinced of their generosity, They were doing people a good turn.
In fact their vile victory was to persuade the majority of the people that
their betterment only existed in middle class terms. At the same time
their own incipient urban culture was so inferior, it was something to be
ashamed of; something to be hidden; to be discarded; to be denied.

The environmental mess left by the first flush of capitalism concerned the
social awareness of the first philantropists; Sewerage, paving, industrial
regulations and municipal government. .But after the Chartists, the middle
class do-gooders began to extend their investment  into civilising the
lower orders.
>From the 1860s philantropists tried to engage the working classes in their
newly won leisure time with what came to be known as 'Rational
Recreation'; choral singing, walks in the country, going to art galleries,
reading books and that sort of thing; orderly pastimes in which little
emotion is physically expressed. Whereas there is nothing wrong with any
of these activities in themselves we have to look at the characteristics
of the package of culture on offer. A package that represents the values
you must embody if you are ever to rise to better things, to do well in
life, become respectable, a good citizen etc. The lack of emotionality,
the good manners (with its sub-text of self control.), the clean and
'healthy' aspects, all
communicate the upper class distaste of 'getting your hands dirty' and its
disengagement from  production and physicality.

The specifically socialist 'self improvement' schemes shared these
characteristics. They mainly succeeded in splitting of those who 'became
socialists' from the majority of working people.
"self imposed exclusion from the conviviality of the cup was often
accompanied by forms of cultural elitism and the failure to reach those
who held very different values." Waters P96.
Ventures such as Leonards Holiday camps, the Clarion cycle clubs and the
Vocal Unions tended to cultivate exclusivity and rejected those who failed
to share their members aspirations. Socialist Clubs did not lead the
working class in any open way but created little islands in which those
seeking a claim to a more respectable status could congregate.
The concept of 'respectability' was a very powerful concept in class
oppression. All in all emergent socialism was characterised by an
alienation from working class culture, rather than an integration.
Socialist culture was "narrow, corporate, defensive and marginal.
Respectability and decorum was required in the music halls. And by 1914
the socialists were attacking  picture palaces as vociferously as they had
attacked music halls a generation earlier." (Waters P96 check..)
A couple of years ago I accompanied a group of kids from the local
adventure playground on one of their holiday trips to the local cinema to
see 'Karate Kid'. I was impressed by their response to the film. As Karate
Kid wins his victory over the bully boys the whole audience
rose up with wild and joyous scream of approval. This was the response of
the early cinema-goers until the requirements of decorum got the better of
them.
The working class activities that couldn't be suppressed were
commercialised. Although this encouraged shallow diversions and perverse
fantasies and restricted direct expression of working class oppression, it
seemed to offer more scope for the expression of working class
desire and identity than that offered by the dry prescriptions and
repressive  moralism of the socialists.
Waters book is a mine of information but I was struck by one important
shortcoming which many of these sources of information shared. The
academic frame within which such rare work exists requires a cool detached
and 'objective' style. The result is that these books do not reflect or
communicate the violent reality of class relations and by that lack they
reflect those same values of detachment. They do not register the outrage
appropriate to the crimes they are discussing. For the working class
reader this engenders a strange aura of unreality.
But further I would say that such knowledge can never be entirely
objective. To hear an oppressed people speak for themselves is information
that cannot be replaced with statistics and death counts.

The denial to people of their own culture is an act of extreme violence
however 'nicely' it is done. However little bloodshed is apparent.
Reconstructing the story of working class culture is a bit like making a
jigsaw up from found pieces.The next piece turned up when an old friend
turned up at an exhibition I was having in an empty shop in Soho,
organised by Alternative Arts. He brought a philosopher friend with him
called Howard Caygill. Howard had written a book 'The Art of Judgement'
which
apparently had a section on the history of Taste, although it mainly
focused on Kant, the first half of the book was taken up with a historical
survey of the development of the philosophy of Taste in Britain and
Aesthetics in Germany. Two different traditions which Kant apparently
tried to compare in order to transcend the bias of Judgement. Only problem
was the book was about 30 quid so I had to wait for interlibrary loan to
get it. It was a difficult but exciting read as it seemed to validate a
lot of my previous thinking as well as provide good information on the
historical formation of British Civil Society and to show how central
concepts of taste were to its foundation and operation.
Finally I forced myself to buy the 1955 first edition of E.P.Thompsons
'William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary', from a second hand book
dealer. In fact in spite of its 900 pages its very readable, if you've a
few weeks to spare. In spite of the authors besotted attitude to
Morris it is an essential source of scholarship on the man and his times.
Later editions are shortened and apparently leave crucial bits out. From
this and other sources I attempted to reconstruct the arguments advanced
in that 'lost' TV programme.

Finally, OK , there was no actual conspiracy. But the repression of
working class culture is so concerted that it appears as if there is.
What appears to have provided this tight co-ordination of the forces of
oppression seems to have been nothing but Good Taste.

"The struggle for liberation is above all an ACT OF CULTURE"
 Amilcar Cabran

Footnote; This introduction serves both to give a broader context to what
follows both historically and to embed the text firmly within  my own life.

Footnote: Kennington Common is where I'm typing this at present and is the
site of the crumbling squat in which Working Press has its address. (the
house was built in the 1880s for servants of Buckingham Palace.) After the
Chartist meeting of 1848 the authorities acted quickly....
"By 1850 the condition of the common had become such that the vicar of St
Marks promoted a scheme to turn the area into a 'place of resort for
respectable persons'. Powers were obtained and, with the support and
encouragement of the Prince Consort, Kennington Park was created, opening
in March 1854."  The Duchy of Cornwall, Ed Crispin Gill. 1987.